Maybe—hopefully—I’m wrong in seeing in
Beam’s vicious characterisation of Warren’s character and appearance some of
the misogyny that in 2012 became a foundational plank of the Republican Party’s
platform.Language about shrillness,
hysteria, shallowness, combined with scrutiny of everything from hair-styles to
pant-suits—these are all weapons in the toolkit of commentators looking to tap
into a vein of sexism that remains altogether too wide and deep in the public.

One of Warren’s crimes?Being “earnest”.Far better, in Beam’s world, to have a
smirking Senator, who mouths all the right homilies to a broken social and
economic system, cosies up to all the powerful interests who will enable some
cosmetic legislation once the senator has surrendered their soul, and who
doesn’t take their job—serving the public interest of our national
community—all that seriously.Because an
earnest, serious, committed—yes, even ideological—politician is no fun for
Beam.A confirmed cynic, he lazily
assumes that everyone shares his complacency, and that any ounce of passion,
commitment, anger, or outrage must be pretence.

He goes on to attack Warren for her
famously blistering questioning of Tim Geithner, the financial sector’s golden
boy in the Treasury Department, arguing that because “the money was long gone
and Geithner couldn’t do anything about it”, ignoring the fact that identifying
and describing a problem, and criticising those responsible for its
manifestation are the first steps on the way to preventing a repetition of such
problems.

Like so many other commentators, Beam
deliberately misconstrues Warren’s arguments about Glass-Steagall, pretending
that she has said that it is some kind of silver bullet to prevent all future
economic turmoil.What Warren has
repeatedly said, but which doesn’t fit the misleading narrative that her
self-satisfied critics like to peddle, is that Glass-Steagall is but one
component amongst a suite of regulations and legislation that should be put in
place to reconfigure our listing moral economy.

Let’s examine this premise.Beam doesn’t bother to tell his readers what
his version of an “effective” Senator would look like.California’s senior Senator, Dianne Feinstein
is often regarded as an “effective” legislator.She’s got a finger in lots of pie, and carries a lot of clout on
national security related issues through her committee chairmanship.She, and most other powerful legislators
certainly behave very differently from Warren.They flip.They flop.They triangulate.They don’t step on any toes.They genuflect to vested interests and kowtow
to their party leaders.They imbibe
conventional wisdom and spout uncritical nonsense.Given command of the ship of state, they
chart a course straight for the rocks, from which irresistibly sirenic vested
interests sing their deceptively-reassuring hymns.Our country is run by politicians who got
where they are by not asking hard questions and by keeping their distance from serious
issues around social, economic, political, and moral reform.

Many “successful” legislators pass
legislation—much of it bad—largely because that legislation doesn’t offend
anyone and doesn’t make significant changes to a political-economy which is
clearly not up to the job of creating a fair, equitable, humane society.Are the legislators who so “successfully”
deregulated the financial sector really all that successful?What about those who “successfully” passed the
Patriot Act and subsequent infringements on human rights?Those who aided President George W Bush in “participation
in a common plan of conspiracy for the accomplishment of crimes against peace”
and “planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes
against peace” (the words used to describe the German government’s crimes
during the Second World War)?Those who negotiate
grand bargains which leave the profits of the wealthy intact and the lives of
working people in tatters?If “success”
means getting your way more often than not, as Beam seems to suggest, the
consequences of such success are nothing less than terrifying.

If Warren has accomplished very little,
is that because she is so bad at what she does, or because most of her invertebrate
colleagues are failures at what they do and lack the moral courage to stand
with her?Does being in a minority
opinion, and not allowing yourself to be bought off like your colleagues make
you wrong?“Speaking truth to power”
does not generally lead to instantaneous political success.“Power”, after all, is accustomed to getting
things its own way, and doesn’t like people who talk back.Besides, I would contest Beam’s claim that
Warren hasn’t accomplished anything.Only
six months into her tenure, building on her public profile, she has done more
to change the nature of the national political conversation—for the better—than
most senators mange over decades.

History is full of struggle—some of it
violent, happily some of it not.The
right to vote; the end to chattel slavery; rights to wages, healthcare, working
hours, vacation time, workplace safety; freedom from colonialism; an end to monarchical
and other authoritarian regimes; equality before the law; the enshrinement of
human rights; the expansion of civil rights...these changes—including the many
which are incomplete—did not come about because of the kind of legislators Beam
seems to idolise.Historical change is
not driven by morally moribund men of moderation who pat their constituents on
their heads and send them on their way with a promise of gradual change over a
period of a hundred years.Ideological agnostics,
by their nature, seldom leave an imprint on their world.

Change rather comes from the pressures
that material conditions create within a society.The force of that change comes from
expressions and demonstrations of discontent from amongst what we rather
quaintly call “ordinary people”, and that change occurs more rapidly when it
finds expression in individuals who combine moral courage and political
conviction to act.

Warren, I believe, represents one
version of this expression, reminding us, as she does, of the unfinished
business of the progressive era early in the last century, when campaigns to
better the lives of working people in the United States, and to put them in a
position of equality to their sometime political and economic masters, were
derailed.They were derailed by half-hearted
reformists who were frightened by the thought of economic justice, political
equality, and a moral economy which would not shrink from judging and punishing
greed and ill-gotten wealth.In
California—to take but one example—the idealism of direct democracy, designed
as an answer to the robber barons of the nineteenth century, has been
recaptured by twenty-first century plutocrats and their hand-picked
representatives, and needs to be revisited.

In 1913, campaigning for the rights of
women to vote, Emmeline
Pankhurst declared that “in the course of our desperate struggle, we have
had to make a great many people uncomfortable”.Pankhurst, the icon of Britain’s suffrage movement, described what in
her view was the only way of breaking up the cosy consensus which consigned
women to the margins of society: “You have to make more noise than anybody
else, you have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody else, you have to
fill all the papers more than anybody else, in fact you have to be there all
the time and see that they do not snow you under, if you are really going to
get your reform realised”.

If Warren’s crusading language makes people
like Beam uncomfortable, that tells me she’s doing something right.We tried incremental, half-hearted, one-step-forward-two-steps-back
reform with President Obama.In him, we
elected someone who was comfortable with the financial industry, cosy with corporate
power, contented with our colonialism, and complacent about what it would take to
change our country.

Warren represents a different brand of
politics.Billed by the representatives
of conventional wisdom as “far left” and “divisive”, she actually demonstrates
a far firmer understanding and more articulate vision of what ought to bring
our divided working and middle classes together in the face of an unprecedented
assault on their livelihoods (which is why she is so threatening to the public’s
assailants).Where Obama, who tried too
hard to compromise, looked uncomfortable and performs abysmally because he
keeps one foot on Wall Street and the other on Main Street, Warren has made it
very clear that she is not prepared to indulge the interests which wrecked our
economy and prey on our people.

Warren is doing more than making
noise.She is trying to break through to
the public with a compelling vision about a more just and equitable country.So it’s no wonder people who fear justice and
equality are doing their best to shout her down.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I work as an assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research. This blog also appears on the website of the Redding Record Searchlight.